Category: History
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Community, History, Imperialism, Literary World, Literature, Race, Refugees, Oral History
Literary Spotlight: “The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives”
September 23, 2021
The Displaced is a collection of seventeen short stories by writers who are refugees. Edited by Viet Thanh Nguyen, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer, each story narrates the writers' experiences of displacement from many countries—Việt Nam, Zimbabwe, Pakistan, Ukraine, Mexico, Ethiopia, Bosnia, fleeing varied circumstances— genocide, poverty, war, state repression, and civil war, of their journeys through different routes, transit points and destinations; journeys that, as one of the authors, Maaza Mengiste, puts it, “break a human being and rearrange them inside” (135). Together these stories challenge singular narratives about displacement and “of perpetual crisis and suffering” in the Global South (Tshuma, 160).
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Between Being and Acting: The Refugee Child in The Jungle
September 1, 2021
The child’s black hair is tangled, and there are faint streaks on her face and arms – dried sweat, perhaps, or soot. Her pink sneakers are worn to the sole. We lock eyes for just a moment before she leaps up and struts – hips swaying – to the opposite end of the stage, as if on a catwalk. Jarred, I flip through my program to find: “Arya Rose Lohmor is 8 years old and loves to perform. In 2014, she walked the ramp in the India Fashion Kids Show in Delhi, India.” Arya plays Little Amal in The Jungle, directed by Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin. Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson’s The Jungle premiered in London in December 2017, followed by St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn and San Francisco’s Curran Theater…
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Refugee Communities as Agents of Historical Change: Tamil Refugee Responses during the Coronavirus Pandemic
May 14, 2021
On April 27, 2020, the Tamil Refugee Council made a statement on Facebook about the extreme difficulties facing Tamil refugees in Australia who had lost their jobs due to the coronavirus pandemic and were unable to feed their children: “On Saturday we had to deliver formula milk for a one-year-old child in Geelong.” Over the following months, the Tamil Refugee Council documented the plight of Tamil refugees on its Facebook page while making visible the vital role played by its Tamil volunteers…
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Transient Performance
March 17, 2021
A photograph of Scherezade Garcia’s In My Floating World, Landscape of Paradise, from the series Theories of Freedom, (2011) adorns the cover of our special issue of Cultural Dynamics on Transient Performance. The material artwork is a sculpture that uses more than thirty swim rings (also called inner tubes or lifesavers) of different sizes and in various hues of blue: either solid or with prints. Suspended in the air or against a wall, these objects are bound to one another with plastic ties; many of them have airport luggage tags that read “JFK.”
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Migrant Justice Beyond Borders: Notes on the Collaborative Project “Migrant Connections”
February 25, 2021
Migrant Connections is an oral history project that connects migrant organizers in Greece and students in the “Borders and Migration” course at the University of Utah to share stories of daily life and activism. You can learn more here: https://migrants.lib.utah.edu
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Cooking Across Generations
April 6, 2020
On November 2, 2019, the United Women of East Africa in San Diego hosted Cooking Across Generations, a community-building gathering of local refugee families from Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia to share their traditional foods and cultural performances. Funded by the Critical Refugees Studies Collective, the event was a collaboration by the UC San Diego Center for Community Health, the Karen Organization of San Diego, and the United Women of East Africa…
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DVAN in France
January 13, 2020
What is the role and place of the diasporic Vietnamese intellectuals and artists in society? Is it to represent the community or be free from the obligations to represent? But if freedom is tied to the very story we have in our head and can be reframed, could this question be too narrow, too simplistic in a way.
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Learning About Migrants and Refugees in Rural Iowa Through Course-Embedded Fieldwork
October 23, 2018
In spring 2018, I taught a sociology course entitled “Migrants, Refugees, and Diasporas” at a private liberal arts college in central Iowa, Grinnell College. The course offered an introduction to the study of migration from a global and transnational perspective.
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Immigrants, Refugees, and American Family Values: A Historical Reckoning
July 16, 2018
In April 2018, the US Department of Justice authorized Immigration and Custom Enforcement officers to file immediate criminal proceedings against any person apprehended while attempting an unauthorized entry into the U.S.—regardless of their reasons for seeking entry—and their subsequent separation from any minor children that accompanied them. As I write, several thousand children between the ages of 5 and 17 are still awaiting court-mandated reunion with their families before the end of July.
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Waiting: Life under Israel-Occupied Palestine
March 15, 2018
In this essay, R.T. shares personal stories and experiences that represent their understanding of the direct consequences that the U.S. support of Israel had had on them, their family, and the Palestinian people.
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The Hidden Scars All Refugees Carry
September 12, 2016
*The following op-ed by Viet Thanh Nguyen was originally published by The New York Times.
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